The eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has urged gaming providers to strengthen child safety measures after information shared with the watchdog revealed shortcomings across the industry. The report found inconsistent approaches to implementing child safety measures on Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft, as research shows nine out of 10 Australian children aged 8 to 17 play online games.
'Australian children have a right to play online without being exposed to predators, sexual extortionists, violent extremist content or other harmful material,' Inman Grant said.
Among the key findings, the report noted that Valve, which owns Steam and Steam Chat, was the only provider that did not use a type of technology widely used by the industry to detect and remove known harmful content. Valve also did not proactively use tools to detect child sexual exploitation or violent material in chats, with current systems mainly flagging scams.
Professor Michael Salter, a child exploitation expert at the University of New South Wales, said Valve and Epic Games' platforms had been linked to nihilistic and sadistic groups targeting children online.
'What we've seen over the last 10 years is firstly a significant amount of online grooming of children through gaming platforms,' Salter said. 'What we see consistently across the gaming ecosystem is that user safety is considered the responsibility of users, and that includes children, and we see gamers really internalise this.'
Roblox, along with Valve, were noted for using only internal datasets to train language detection systems and for not regularly retraining these models. Minecraft and Fortnite, which offer child accounts, generally let users self-declare their age, meaning anyone who said they were adults could access higher-risk communication features. Steam also relies on self-declared age.
'We expect these services to lift their game to identify and combat serious harms such as child sexual exploitation, sexual extortion and material and activity which promotes, incites or instructs violence,' Inman Grant said.
The regulator said that 'these platforms have a duty of care to ensure that these are as safe as possible, and they shouldn't have to farm out the responsibility to the parents to make sure that children are not being contacted by predators.'